Too Big To Fail
Playfish's John Earner on the pleasures and problems of making The Sims Social
We began with what we call a "technical feasibility study." Can you recreate the isometric experience of looking at Sims that have some intelligence of their own? That creates some CPU requirements, for example, it creates a lot of art challenges and technical challenges. Is it even feasible?
We spent a month just proving that, yeah, in fact we could make little Sims move around houses that you could decorate, and those little Sims could have some autonomy of their own. Once we knew that was feasible then we began the deconstruction process, and we worked very closely with the guys at EA Play, which is now called Maxis; people that worked on The Sims through to The Sims 3 and continue to work on Sims projects to this day.
They brought around 11 years of experience on this franchise to the table, answering a lot of the questions that we were encountering for the first time. They also have a lot of development experience on large-scale teams; they've seen what a 100 person dev team looks like, they've had a lot of practice operating on that kind of scale.
What we bought to the conversation was platform expertise; we understand how social games work, what has been successful in the past, what this player likes. If you imagine a Venn diagram, we have expanded the definition of The Sims' player-base. The majority of our players have never played a Sims game before, and we know a lot about that audience.
Lastly, we have a lot of data, and we have a quantitative aspect of our DNA that asks the question, 'How does a player really engage in the game? What do they really like to do? They tell you what they like to do, but what do we actually see and observe in the data?'
We have expanded the definition of The Sims' player-base. The majority of our players have never played a Sims game before
Reconstructing it required both sides to make compromises on what they generally viewed as 'norms'. For our part, we were making a game far more ambitious with a lot more features ready on day one than what we considered the norm. For the Play label's part, they had to depart with some of the things that had become accepted canon with the Sims franchise.
But what we put out is a great first step, and what I'm really optimistic about is - as great as The Sims Social is - we have many renewable opportunities to continue to bring this franchise to the Facebook platform in different variations, just as you've seen The Sims do with expansion packs. We can do that by continuing to add on to The Sims Social over the coming years, but also when the sort of thing we want to do is a significant enough departure from [The Sims Social], we can make a new game.
So that gives us a huge runway over the next few years to bring The Sims to Facebook in a massive way.
It's both. I'll give you an example of a technical challenge: it would be very technically challenging for us to have, on day one, multiple Sims that you owned.... So you create a guy, a girl, and they have a kid, and that entire experience takes place in a single player game; that was technically very challenging for us.
The envelope as to what we can pull off technically changes every day, but in our game when you have more than three little Sims on the screen you really start to encounter performance issues that are overwhelming. When you consider that the game is social by nature, if each of us has three Sims the moment that I visit you the whole game begins technically to break down.
On the design side we faced a particular challenge around one question: are you the Sim, or are you some sort of demi-god, because that's classic Sims canon? In our game, even though we designed it so there's a separation between what you want and what the Sim wants, players really find themselves adopting their Sims persona far more than in other Sims games, because the relationships they choose to engage with are with their friends.
Right now, the biggest limitation in social games is on the design side. By the time you get to the point where you want to make something that's technically more challenging than, say, Flash allows for, you're probably designing a game that's more hardcore than the audience. On the flip side, it is very easy to make a game just a few steps too complicated, and in doing so you lose your entire user-base.